The human being in action : the irreducible element in man, part II : investigations at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry

PAUL RICOEUR be only a cross-section of an all-encompassing flux in which each of us has not only contemporaries but predecessors and successors as well. This higher order temporality carries with it its own intelligibility involving categories which are not just extensions of the categories of individual action (project, motivation, ascribing an act to an agent who can do what he does, and so on). The categories of common actions make specific relations between contemporaries, predecessors, and successors possible, and among these is found the transmission of traditions to the extent that this forms a tie which can be broken or renewed. Now the inner connection belonging to this all-encompassing flux we call history is subordinated not only to these categories of common action (which Max Weber discusses in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft), but to a higher order transcendental principle which plays the same role as the Kantian "I can" which is held to accompany all my representations. This higher principle is the principle of analogy implied in the initial act of pairing diverse temporal fields, those of our contemporaries, those of our predecessors, and those of our successors. These fields are analogous in the sense that each of us, in principle, can exercise the function of I just as any other and can ascribe his experience to himself. It is here, as we shall see, that the imagination is involved. But first it must be recalled that the principle of analogy has, unfortunately, most often been mistakenly interpreted in terms of an argument, in the sense of reasoning by analogy; as if in order to ascribe to another the power of saying "I," I had to compare his behavior to mine and to employ an argument using the proportional fourth term based on the purported resemblance between the behavior of others observed from outside and my own experienced directly. The analogy implied in the coupling is in no way an argument. It is the transcendental principle establishing the other as another self like myself, a self like my self. The analogy here involves the direct transfer of the meaning"!." Like me, my contemporaries, my predecessors, and my successors can say "I." It is in this way that I am historically related to all the others. It is also in this sense that the principle of analogy between the various temporal fields is to the handing down of traditions what the Kantian "I think" is to the causal order of experience. Such is the transcendental condition under which the imagination is a fundamental component in founding the historical field. It is not by accident that Husser!, in the Fifth Meditation, bases his notion of analogical apperception on that of imaginative transfer. To say that you think as I do, that you experience pleasure and pain as I do, is to be able to Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Imagination in Discourse and in Action....Pages 3-22 The Problem of Passive Constitution....Pages 23-36 Bodilyness ( Leibhaftigkeit ) and History in Husserl....Pages 37-42 Activity and Passivity in the Genesis of the Cognitive Process in Children’s Development....Pages 43-50 Perplexity....Pages 51-63 The Will-to-Act....Pages 65-79 Depressive Doing and Acting....Pages 81-92 Les Crises de L’Homme Agissant....Pages 93-98 The Subject of Action....Pages 99-105 Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man....Pages 107-114 Ethical Action and Consciousness....Pages 115-150 On Moral Action....Pages 151-162 Contextual Phenomenology and the Problem of Creativity....Pages 163-174 Front Matter....Pages 175-175 The Prototype of Action: Ethical or Creative?....Pages 177-211 Front Matter....Pages 213-213 Association....Pages 215-234 Brentano’s Concept of the Evident....Pages 235-244 Evidence and the Aim of Cognitive Activity....Pages 245-258 Back Matter....Pages 259-262